


whose god, whose angel

by theformerone



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Gore, Horror Elements, Jashinism, Jashinist Konan, Mentions of past necrophilia, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Slow Burn, Slow To Update, Violence, Warped reincarnation, this is gonna get gross
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-11
Updated: 2018-10-07
Packaged: 2019-06-26 00:16:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15651852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theformerone/pseuds/theformerone
Summary: Nagato's Uzumaki vitality fails him before their world of peace is born. Konan is left with his bones and Yahiko's, in a village where the rain never ends.There's a devil she knows and a god that she doesn't. After Nagato dies, Konan doesn't believe in prophecies, in old words and changing the world. She believes in death, and nothing else.





	1. god and his priests and his kings

He's cold. That's no surprise. Konan has handled corpses before. In Ame, a body is frozen by the time it hits the ground. The rain makes sure of it; the downpour is always frigid, no matter what time of year. 

She has to be careful with him though, more careful than she had been with Yahiko. Nagato's skin is thin and white as the paper she uses to kill, and it will tear  if she isn't careful. The chakra receivers that stick out from his skin make him look like a grotesque porcupine. These are warm, his many spines. Some of them, near the most active of his tenketsu are nearly hot to the touch. 

She blocks out the sound of his flesh parting over flesh, of his bones shifting under his skin to make space for her little surgery. There's none of his own filth staining his legs; he barely ate in these last years, barely needed to or so he said. 

She had been in his office at their base, speaking to him through Yahiko's wrong face. His lip had spasmed awkwardly, painfully, and then he had fallen. Like a puppet with its strings cut. Konan disappeared in a flurry of white origami paper, unraveled space and time around herself for the rapid jumps it took to get to where Nagato was hidden. 

She wasn't there when he breathed his last. It must have happened somewhere in between Yahiko's face going slack and her dash to her last living friend. He is already cold by the time she gets to him. 

The rain doesn't touch him here, but the last of his chakra was being eaten by the receivers when she arrived. With no one left to direct them, they sucked hungrily at Nagato's corpse until even his blood was cold as the rains that pelted Amegakure. 

One of them snaps as she wraps Nagato's body in paper. She watches it roll across the floor as she builds him a burial shroud like the one she had laid Yahiko to rest in untl Nagato cut it open for the body that hid underneath. 

Her heels are loud against the ground as she walks over to pick it up. Their sharp clicks remind her of the days when she questioned the necessity of kunoichi wearing such footwear. She was a child then, trying to survive a war and a famine. The shoes of the kunoichi that raided her town were one of the easier things to critique, to turn her nose up at. 

Konan picks up the receiver and it thrums under her grasp. It's still heavy with power, with Nagato's chakra. She doubts they will ever stop humming with it, singing with it. Not until she snaps them beneath her heels, grinds them into dust. 

Her paper follows the twitching of her fingers. The chakra receivers become nothing under soft sheafs of white. All but the one in her hand. 

Konan pockets it, and goes about the business of burial. 

* * *

The shrine will take work, will take time that she does not have today. She had to seal away Nagato's body in a storage scroll stretched to capacity to accommodate the body inside of it. She doubled back for Yahiko's corpse. She tugged a receiver from his ear and dropped it into her pocket. 

His body had still had some heat to it when Nagato made him into his Deva Path. So much heat it had shocked Konan, because Yahiko had died in the rain, that pelting Ame rain. The rain that had forced the both of them to their knees that day. One of the receivers was slightly paler than the other; there had only been one piercing's worth of chakra left in Yahiko's body by the time Nagato warped it. 

He couldn't get rid of the last pieces of Yahiko still on this realm. So he had stolen some. Emptied one of his receivers and slimmed it down, had Konan do the piercing so it would be tidy and clean. A little piece of Yahiko's life still buzzing about in this world. Only a little bit. Enough for both of them to feel it when the Deva Path was near. In the beginning, it had made Konan breathless to sense it. To come home from an assignment on behalf of Akatsuki and to  _feel_ Yahiko back where he belonged. 

That breathless anticipation had given way to despair when she remembered what had been done, what had happened, and who had done it. After the first time, Konan only came home stone faced. 

She knows that Nagato had hoped that having a little bit of Yahiko's chakra on the Deva Path would make her want to stay. As if following through with their shared dream wasn't enough. As if creating a world where a dreamer like Yahiko could have thrived wouldn't have been enough. Nagato had hoped that this puppet of his would bring her some comfort. 

It hadn't. 

The Deva Path didn't decay like a real corpse did. Instead, it glutted itself on Nagato's chakra, until it seemed older than the young fifteen Yahiko had been when he was killed. He was a man. A man that Konan could have been with, stayed with. Loved. 

She was wrong for it, for sleeping with that corpse. For guiding what was so obviously something cold and unfeeling into her own wet heat, still alive. Nagato's Rinnegan eyes had stared up at her, unthinking, unfeeling. She wrapped her paper around them, shut them out, tugged as many of the piercings as she could out of his face. Tried to remember the boy she had fallen in love with. 

It hadn't helped. It had only hurt. But Nagato had let her do it. Had helped her do it. Anything to keep her in Ame, to keep her by his side. To stave off what loneliness had come when Yahiko had died and left them both to nothing. 

Now they have both left Konan. 

 _'Not for long,_ ' she thinks, selfish and wicked and  _awful_ as her fingers curl around the little pieces of spirit in her pockets.  _'Not for long.'_

* * *

The receivers feel like living things, like thumping heartbeats in her pocket as she snakes her way down the hall. Deidara and Sasori are out scouting Sunagakure's defenses. Kakuzu is hunting down a bounty somewhere in Kusa. Tobi and Zetsu are elbow deep in Kiri, maintaining the illusion over the Mizukage. Itachi and Kisame are doing mercenary work in Iron Country.

She and Hidan are the only ones in the base. 

The heartbeats in her pocket start to roar in her ears with her intention. 

Konan is God's Angel. She is the mouthpiece for Nagato's will in Ame, for Yahiko's will on earth. There is no inheritor to their dream except for herself, and Konan knows better than to think that without their shadowy leader, Akatsuki will not fall apart. 

They will all feel the lack of Nagato when they return. They will known Pein has disappeared because the sheer magnificence, the heavy terrible weight of his chakra will have disappeared as well. 

Konan can't disappear. Not now. Not ever. These people in Akatsuki, they can't be trusted to take over Yahiko's dream, Nagato's dream. Kisame is the only one Konan can even think to trust with it; he is one of the few there who want a world of truth and not just blood for the sake of blood, freedom without repercussions. 

She will make him her second, when all of this nasty business is through. Itachi would follow him, to be sure. Konan didn't have all the information on the Uchiha Massacre, but she was born in Ame. She knew a cull when she saw one, and scapegoats were twice as easy to spot. 

Sasori would have to go when she put her own plan into action. Deidara as well; he was too wily, too quick to make his own decisions. He was a child and he behaved like one. It would upset Tobi, but Konan would be able to handle it. The two had come into the organization together but they were different from one another. Tobi would stay even if Deidara left. Zetsu's only concern was his stomach. Kakuzu would go wherever the money went. Eventually, the money would land on Konan's head, and he would come for her. But that wouldn't matter. Not for long. Not for long. 

Peace through submission to Nagato's will, to Yahiko's, was still peace. Even if her new Akatsuki did not like it, they would find it more appealing than the lies they had been fed by their villages. Konan would never presume to be false about her intentions. The shinobi she kept at her side would know that. Peace would come through control, and they would  _know_ that Konan was in control. 

She stops outside of Hidan's door, his god's symbol writ in white paint on the dark wood. She waits even as the heartbeats in her pocket demand her attention, demand she turn around and find another way. Konan doesn't budge. 

She cannot afford to die while their dream is still unrealized. So Konan will not die. 

He opens the door with a sneer on his face. His cloak is unbuttoned, pooling around his waist where it tapers. It exposes the hard lines of his chest, the old, puffy white and pink scars that healed before he gave himself over to his god. 

"The fuck do you want?" 

It's politeness, coming from Hidan. It's more than what she expected. She doesn't let it show. 

Konan steps forward but Hidan doesn't budge. He's only three inches taller than her, but they're of a height when she's in her heels. They're face to face, breaths away from a collision. Hidan snorts, but he moves first. 

He steps back and allows her into his small apartment, but he doesn't give her his back. She doesn't give him hers. Instead, she walks further into his room. She looks at it, the tidiness of it despite the verses written in white paint on the walls, glowing in the dark. 

"Scripture," Hidan says, puffing up proudly. 

"For Jashin," she murmurs, but doesn't reach out to touch them. 

"Jashin- _sama_ , you goddamn heathen."

Konan says nothing, but reads the poetry on the walls. It's beautiful inasmuch that poetry demanding the suffering of others, the agony of the world, spilled out onto an altar for a god masked in white and black to devour can be beautiful. It quiets the heartbeats in her pocket. They grow subdued instead of wilder, and Konan wonders if they know what she is planning on doing. 

She reaches out, mouth working around the words.

_'And God Saw their pain and Devoured it so that it was God's own, and Healed their bodies of wounds so that they would suffer again. For the Truth of All Things is Pain, and God is Truth, and God's Mercy and Love and Sight are Pain and so we suffer and bring suffering to others so that so that we may come to know God.'_

His scythe comes down, curving around the column of her throat, but a wall of paper catches it. Part of Nagato's plan had been to never take anyone into Akatsuki that he couldn't beat in a fight. Konan isn't sure of what that says about her own abilities, but when she was dispatched to assassinate him, she was the one who convinced him to join Akatsuki instead of destroying another one of Kakuzu's hearts. 

Even if she wasn't stronger than him, she was smarter than him. And she very much doubted that he was stronger than her. 

"You wanna know God?" Hidan asks, the shortest blade of his scythe pressing roughly into the first layer of Konan's defense. 

She turns her head to look at him. His violet eyes don't look wild as they usually do when he brings his sacrifices back to base. Instead, he looks predatory. As if Konan is not a predator herself. 

His eyes cast down over her face, over the labret below her lip, down her jaw and over her shoulders. "I can hear him now. You've been in his eye since you were a kid." His eyes narrow at her, his head cocked as if he's really hearing a voice whispering in his mind. "Time wasn't right then," he purrs, voice a low rumble. "I wonder what's changed now."

The heartbeats are quiet in her pocket. The shell of Konan's ear grows cold, so cold she nearly flinches. She holds steady. Hidan's breath is hot on the right side of her face, but to the left there is an insistent chill. It crawls down her throat into the collar of her cloak, prickling at her skin, tugging gooseflesh to attention. 

Realization dawns on Hidan's face though Konan hasn't said anything out loud. He lets out a low whistle, his grin going wolfish. "You're not here to be a sacrifice," he says, the discovery curling over in his mouth like something fine. "You're here to join the flock."

He lets out a roaring laugh, and his scythe swings away from her throat. He holds it over his shoulder with one hand, while the other wraps around his sides as if to keep his laughter in. 

"What," he asks, blinking what must be tears from his eyes, "you think because you've been through some shit, you're  _worthy_ of being one of His hands? A pair of His eyes?"'

Konan says nothing. It's something she's prone to. She waits until Hidan stops laughing, until he stands up at his full height again. She waits until his eyes lose their mirth, and his gaze on her goes considering. 

"Shit," he says, letting out a low whistle. "You're serious."

She lifts an eyebrow. 

"I always am."

Hidan snorts out a laugh at that, but he doesn't back off. He's in her space, still nearly on top of her, but Konan has dealt with worse. Men of a certain rank always felt the need to lord themselves over her until she showed them why they shouldn't. 

"Why do you think you're worthy?" Hidan asks, hand propped on his hip. 

He's assessing her, and Konan wonders when she walked into a test. She turns her face back to the writing on the wall, lets the paper that has protected her settle back underneath her sleeves and supplement the inner lining of her cloak as a first defense. 

"If God's Sight is Pain," she murmurs, eyes on the wall, "then I have seen through God's eyes." 

She cuts her eyes to Hidan. His eyes are narrowed, his expression closed off. It's odd. It's the most serious she's ever seen him. 

"I don't want to see through God's eyes," Konan says. "I want to see God."

He folds his scythe onto his back and crosses his arms over his chest. 

"This isn't the place you come for suicide," he says, lip curled. "That's a waste for Jashin-sama."

Konan shakes her head. She doesn't want to die. No, that's the last thing she's asking for. She wants life beyond death, life beyond living. She just wants  _time_. 

"I don't want to die."

Hidan full on snarls and when he lays his hand on her, Konan doesn't stop him. He forces her back, slams her by her shoulders into the wall. His grip is fierce; he barley needs to add any chakra if he was inclined to break her bones. 

"He doesn't want fuckers seeking  _immortality_ either," he bites. "That's just a  _perk_. You have no idea what you're asking for, and no idea  _who_ you're asking for it."

Konan stares at him, at his flared nostrils, his harried breath. She has seen Hidan in the throes of fanaticism, has heard him screaming in devotion when he returns from his missions with a sacrifice that he could not make on the journey home. 

"I don't want immortality," she says. "It's a means to an end."

"And what's the end?" he asks. 

The heartbeats thump once in tandem in her pocket. 

"I want to end this world."

The chill that crept over her slowly before washes over her now. Konan is chilled like she would be if she were standing in the Ame rain. The chill gives way to a low heat, one that vibrates from outside of her into the marrow of her. It hooks itself in her tenketsu themselves and beats, beats,  _beats_. The words spill because she cannot stop them, because the beat is driving them out and the chill is catching them, throwing them onto the wall where the scripture is written in white. 

"Annihilation," she whispers. "I want nothing less than obliteration. Nothing less than nothing at all."

She hears war drums from a far distant nowhere, hears the sounds of fighting. Hears screaming.

"I want a world of truth," she says, and smells blood, thick in her nose. She can feel Nagato's paper thin corpse under her hands, can feel the quiet warmth of Yahiko's body. Can see her mother's body, bloated in the river. Can see her father, his hands severed and bleeding in the street. Her sisters, stolen and then sold and hanging out of windows, waving at shinobi passing through, their amber eyes dull and weak. Sees her brother in his hitai-ate, grinning down at her, preparing for war. She sees Jiraiya-sensei leave them, sees his eyes catch on her, feels terribly like her sisters and understands why their eyes grew so dull. She sees Yahiko impale himself on Nagato's blade. Sees Nagato show her the Deva Path. Feels his cold, dead cock pierce her like ice and the rain and a knife. 

"And the truth is pain."

Konan breathes in the ugliest moments of her life. Through it all, she sees Hidan's violet eyes go wide. 

"Alright," he says, when the chill in Konan settles and the war drums rage, the heartbeats in her pocket leaping up to catch their rhythm. "Alright."

His hands go from rough to gentle at her shoulders. He leans back then guides her into the symbol etched in old blood and white paint in the center of his room. He pushes her down and she follows, lies prostrate on the floor.

"You wanna meet God," Hidan says, a little smile, oddly genuine on his face. He's close enough to kiss, close enough to reach out with the heel of her hand and smash his nose back up into his brain, to use her thumbs to gouge his violet eyes back into his skull. "And He wants to meet you, too."


	2. the unknown us

God is a woman. 

She is Konan's mother. Her skin is black and her eyes are white, and around her throat hangs a medallion just like Hidan's. She stares down at Konan where she is prostrate on the floor, one fine white eyebrow arched. 

"I See all that you are." 

There are no tears in Konan's eyes, but there is a scream burning behind her throat. Every wound that has ever been inflicted on her in her life, every wound she has ever inflicted on another; all of them, all of them lance through her body in a chorus of agony. She cannot move. A terrible weight suffocates her, pins her to the ground, while God stands above her, face impassive. 

"I See all that you have been."

Konan can't shut her eyes. She desperately wants to. She is choking on her own spit, on a torrent of blood, on bile and vomit and cum. She's going to die. Or is she dying already? She can't tell where the life is leaving her and where death comes to take its place. She is trembling, but the weight on her body holds her. It does not let her thrash, does not let her sit up and claw at her throat, to pull the scream out from where it is locked behind her teeth. 

"I See all that you will become."

Konan doesn't believe in God. She never has. This God is strange. She is a woman, and she is merciless. Though she wears her mother's face, there is no warmth in her eyes. No willingness to comfort. No smiles. Konan's father was the stoic one. Her mother always tried to find a reason to laugh. 

God is her mother, and She is a stranger. 

"Give it to me," God says. 

The command drags Konan upwards, pulls her up to sitting. As soon as she's stable, her hands are yanked behind her back and held with bruising force. Konan's nose fills with the smell of copper and freshly pressed paper. She does not cry. She will  _not._

"You will," God says, not smiling, not grimacing. Her bright white eyes narrow. "You will if you want to be One with Me."

Konan shakes her head. She doesn't - But doesn't she? Hadn't she gone to Hidan for this? Hadn't she made her choice? There was nothing to be afraid of now, there couldn't have been. Her resolve had to be firm. She had a world to purge. She needed guidance. She needed strength. 

"Give it to me," God says again, her voice somehow gentle over the roar of salt and old pain thrumming through Konan's whole body. Her voice slips through Konan's shaking, through her aching, and soothes her. "Give me your pain."

Konan opens her mouth, and a torrent of blood pours from her lips. Old blood, gone brown and dark, thick as sludge slipping between her teeth and down onto her chin. The blood of every man, every woman she's killed, every person she's harmed for the sake of her goal. And her own blood, the blood she shed in return. 

She hacks it up, coughs it, feels it force its way up her throat and out of her mouth. Dribbles down her chin. It stains the white altar beneath her, fills in the words written in a script so ancient, Konan couldn't even begin to decipher it. It fills the chasms in the crevices made by those old characters, fills the triangle and circle that contain them. 

The sound of war drums fills the air, or does it only fill Konan's ears? It's all she can hear, all she can focus on. It moors her as she spits, as she forces the blood that has somehow invaded her body out through her mouth. 

She purges herself of the horrors she has inflicted, and the truth of them forges her contract. Konan drags her arms out of the clutches of whatever is holding them back, and gets onto her hands and knees. She bares her mouth, scrapes her lips against the sigils on the altar, forces two fingers into her mouth, and  _pulls._

She catches something and tugs just a little harder, her nails digging into it. The body of the thing fills up her mouth as she draws it out of her throat, and when she gets it past her teeth, she can taste the odd tang of bile and saliva; a warning to stop tampering with her own body. 

In her hands, is a heart black with old blood, its arteries and veins drawn taut back inside of Konan, a flurry of strange dark life between her teeth. She raises her head to where God stands before her. The corners of her pale lips quirk up. 

"Give it to me," She says. "Give me your truth."

Konan lifts it, raises it to her, and God reaches out to take it. She lifts it to her white mouth. She looks Konan in the eye as she bares a row of black teeth, and bites into it. 

Finally,  _finally_ , Konan can scream. 

The war drums beat a deafening tattoo, and as God eats Konan's heart, the veins in her mouth turn pale as God's face. The old blood filling the sigils in the altar runs red as if it were newly spilt. 

The world around them runs in shades of black and white and red and Konan screams until she's sure her throat is bleeding, too. 

God eats Konan's heart in slow, rending bites. She eats, and eats, until she is on her knees before Konan, chasing her veins into her mouth. God's lips are pale, and they smear red with Konan's blood. She eats Konan's veins, tugs at them with her teeth, swallows all Konan's screaming as she does. 

It's the worst kiss Konan's ever had. A sob interrupts her screaming. A migraine splits the sound of the pounding drums. God holds Konan's face tenderly between her hands, and tils her head up so that she can look into God's white eyes. 

"That's it, my child," God says, finally,  _finally_ smiling. And Konan could weep for that alone, for this one moment of grace. "All of it. Give all of it to me."

Konan hasn't cried since Yahiko died. Hasn't given herself the time. Hasn't let herself  _feel_ enough to feel grief. Has bottled up everything that hasn't served her and put it in a tightly sealed box in her mind for safekeeping. 

But she looks into the face of God, and all she can do is sob. She cannot deny her God anything. She must give Her all her pain, all her truth, all her ugly. 

God smiles down at her, accepting all that she is, all that she has been, and all that she will come to be. She presses a thumb to Konan's forehead, soft as a kiss. When God takes her thumb away, there is an inverted triangle in its place. 

"Go, child," God says. "And save others as you have been Saved." 

Konan's mouth is open, terrified of being left, terrified of leaving God so soon after meeting her. But God only smiles at her, and tenderly,  _tenderly_ presses their mouths together again. 

* * *

 

Konan wakes up with her own heart beating in her fist. She is standing on her knees, alone at the center of the sigil on the floor of Hidan's room. Hidan is in front of her, his back to the door, violet eyes narrowed on her face. His hand is wrapped tightly around his amulet, and prayers are falling in soft echoes from his lips. 

Konan's heart thumps in her hand. She stares at it, then down. She must have burst her own ribcage. Her Akatsuki cloak is missing and so is her shirt, her breasts bare and dry with sticky blood. 

More of it has covered the ground around her, has somehow been sucked into the sigil on Hidan's floor. Konan can feel the way her lifeblood has nurtured the sigil, the chakra in it responding to whatever strange fuinjutsu is murmuring in the seal. 

In the back of her mind, she can hear something. Or feel something. Like whispers, soft little murmurs. Two voices, taking shape. They're familiar somehow. Konan can't quite put her finger on it. 

She gives her heart a squeeze, and flinches. With more care, she gently presses it back into her chest, into the whole she somehow made to rip it out in the first place. Her ribs quiver and slowly begin to mend themselves. She takes in a deep breath, testing. The air comes out as if she never opened her own chest cavity. 

Konan opens her mouth, and feels her stomach roil something awful. Hunger. An aching hunger like none she's ever known before lances through her. It localizes in her stomach, reminding her of the famines during her childhood, but then it thrums up higher. It wraps a hand around her spine and makes her stand erect, lights up the back of her neck, raises the hairs on the back of her arms. It stirs a wetness between her thighs, drags saliva into her mouth. 

The pain and the breath she took after; she wants more of that. Her God demands more of that. 

She looks up at Hidan, and there's a little smile on his face. 

"He likes you," he says. 

Konan says nothing; whether or not her God likes her is neither here nor there. Her God has agreed to let Konan be one of her avatars, has decided that Konan's mission is worthy of her strength. 

Bring death and through death, freedom. That was the world that her God demanded, and that was the world that Konan would build. 

"Where," Konan asks, voice haggard. It surprises her. She hadn't realized she had been screaming in this world as well as the other one. "Where do you find your sacrifices?"

Hidan's little smile breaks wide. His hand falls away from his medallion and reaches back to the doorknob. 

"I'll show you," he replies. "But make yourself decent first."

His eyes don't linger where she's made herself bare, and that is enough to surprise Konan as well. She grabs at her cloak, taking notice of how her top has been torn beyond repair. She draws her cloak around her, and now understands why Hidan often goes around shirtless. More convenient that way. 

"What're you after?" Hidan asks once she's drawn herself to her feet. Even though she's shaky getting to them, he doesn't offer her any help. She appreciates it; as a shinobi, it's a high compliment. "I know you think you're all holy. You want drug lords? Pimps? Bad men doing icky things to nice little girls?" 

Konan blinks slowly, and presses her fingers to her lips. She can still feel the ghost of God's mouth there, can still taste the old blood of her victims, and her own lifeblood. She closes her eyes, and lets out a soft breath. 

"No." 

Hidan cocks an eyebrow at her, tilting his head to match. 

"No?" he asks. "They all seemed your type, and there's plenty of em still left in this little shithole country of yours." 

"I'm aware," Konan replies. "But I'm not looking for sacrifices. I want to give more to Jashin-sama." 

Hidan sucks his teeth in annoyance. He never liked how cryptic she could be. But his curiosity is plain in his gaze. 

"More?" he needles. "The fuck do you mean by more?" 

Konan opens her eyes and her mouth. Slowly, she swipes her tongue against the still red pads of her fingers. The roaring in her veins, in her spine, in her stomach, in her cunt - they all still for a moment. 

"I'm going to give Her a flock."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> happy october, this is just gonna get freakier as we go.


End file.
